Montreal Events Quicklist

12 noon (Book Launch and Design Seminar)

TYPE Books
883 Queen Street West
(416) 366-8973

On Designing Water

Alphabet City art director Kelsey Blackwell discusses the processes and ideas she used in making the Water anthology. One of Canada’s leading book designers, Blackwell has previously worked at Bruce Mau Design and Pentagram.

Kevin Yates

2–4 pm (Exhibition Opening)

Susan Hobbes Gallery
137 Tecumseth Street
Thursday to Saturday from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm and by appointment; continues through December 12.

Kevin Yates

This exhibition features a selection of new cast bronze sculptures of vernacular architecture in miniature. Along the gallery walls, weathered clapboard dwellings sit in silent intervals on an invisible horizon line, creating a suburban landscape caught in quiet repose. Yates has painstakingly sculpted each building as a mirrored reflection of itself as if each one was partially submerged in water. These tiny, hermetic models exist quietly in the aftermath of a larger disaster, becoming impenetrable spaces to contemplate the psychology of this deserted community.

Kevin Yates has had solo exhibitions at Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery (Owen Sound), Artspeak (Vancouver), YYZ Artists’ Outlet (Toronto), ODD Gallery (Dawson City, Yukon), among others. He currently lives in Grafton, Ontario and is a faculty member in the department of Visual Arts at York University.

3 pm to late (Installation and Festival Opening Party)

Psychodrama: 13 Variations

Melissa Grey, composerPsychodrama: 13 Variations is an audiovisual electroacoustic composition of 13 scores for the shower sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho. Written for large chamber ensemble, electronic/tape and video, Psychodrama is a continuous one-movement composition. Each variation performs a rescoring and a spatial restructuring of the original imagery while contributing to a larger through-line of repetition and variation. Patterns of lament in concert music, field recordings of watery environments, and the organization of sound in horror cinema contribute to a compositional palette that extends space and meaning beyond the shower sequence from 1960.

Facilitated by RiverSides and featuring guest speakers Elder Garry Sault of the Mississauga of the New Credit First Nation–who will discuss the Land Claim associated with the Toronto Purchase Agreement and the First Nations Water Declaration–andMark Mattson from Lake Ontario Waterkeeper. Mattson will discuss the multi-jurisdictional nature of water and its impacts on protection and management of waters with special focus on Lower Don and Toronto's Waterfront and Lake Ontario

For more information about this event:
t 416.868.1983

Riversides is supported by the Water Guardians Network, the Unilever Foundation, and Mountain Equipment Co-op.

5 pm (Exhibition, Readings and Panel Discussion)

The Department Gallery, 1389 Dundas St. West

Water, Life and Baths

Watery photographic works from Alphabet City's Water anthology are on exhibition one day only as part of AbC's exciting new Art from the Anthologies collaboration with Circuit Gallery that offers a series of affordable, limited-edition artworks drawn from the Alphabet City anthologies. For more information:http://circuitgallery.com/http://circuitgallery.com/projects/alphabet-city

Under, Jowita Bydlowska (2008)

Moderator Ian Brown will convene three literary contributors to Water (all of them recent mothers)–Jowita Bydlowska, Astrida Neimanus, and Christie Pearson–who will read from their essays and reflect together on the life of watery beings.

WOMEN, WATER / A memoir portrays women in their baths and the traumas that follow them there. Jowita Bydlowska is a Toronto writer.

BODIES OF WATER / As human bodies, we are essentially bodies of water. What relations and responsibilities to other watery bodies flow from this liquid life? Astrida Neimanis teaches women’s studies and peace studies at McMaster University.

THE PUBLIC BATH AND THE CITY / What is the role of the public bath in the psychic economy of the city? Christie Pearson creates buildings, installations, and events inspired by world bathing traditions.

Monday 2 November

5:30 pm (Panel Discussion)

Hart House
7 Hart House Circle
University of Toronto

*** The first 25 audience members to arrive will get a free copy of Alphabet City’s Water anthology ***

HYDROCity* panel: Water, Cities, Disaster

Panelists George L. Cooke (President and CEO, The Dominion of Canada General Insurance Co., Toronto), Prof. Robert Kirkbride (Parsons The New School for Design, NYC), Paul Kovacs (Executive Director, Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, Toronto), and Tracy Metz (author and journalist, NRC Handelsblad, Amsterdam) discuss the future of urban life during an era in which global warming will drive catastrophic changes in hydrology even as cities face decades-long deficits in infrastructure investment. Moderated by Rotterdam independent curator Anneke Abhelakh.

Panel created in partnership with InfraNet Lab and sponsored by The Dominion.

*There are THREE HYDROCity events in the WATER festival, each exploring the future of urban water infrastructures. Water shortages are changing patterns of urbanization and requiring increasingly elaborate infrastructures by which to source and transport water to urban centers, which in turn need to be redesigned and retrofitted to conserve, collect, repurify, and recirculate water resources. HYDROCity asks what forms of urbanism and landscape systems will emerge, and what design potentials exist, in this expanding liquid infrastructure? HYDROCity was made possible through the generous support of the Mondriaan Foundation.

Tuesday 3 November

1 pm (Lunchtime talk)

John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto
Room 106, 230 College Street

The Building of “WaterpleinenWatersquare”: Jeroen Bodewits

Created for the City of Rotterdam, Watersquare responds to the increasingly violent rainstorms that will be driven by global warming by seeking to catch rain and thereby create playful public features while preserving the water quality in the canals. Watersquare was designed by Marco Vermeulen and Florian Boer and constructed by Jeroen Bodewits. Model on exhibition at Daniels through 13 November.

Wednesday 4 November

7pm (Opera Performance and Dinner)

The Ladies of the Lakes

Experience the the allure of famous watery ladies in opera scenes performed live at the Drake Hotel. Excerpts from Rossini to Dvorak will be accompanied by a sumptuous lake-themed, three-course dinner designed for the occasion by the Drake’s acclaimed chef Anthony Rose. This one-time-only evening brings together the arts of music, cuisine, and book-making in a fundraiser for Opera in Concert, a company that is truly one of Toronto’s cultural gems.

The evening will introduce you to some impressive Divas: Sopranos Catherine Rooney, Luiza Zhuleva and Mezzo soprano Amanda Jones. Guillermo Silva-Marin will be Master of Ceremonies and Pianist Michael Rose will be the Music Director for the evening.

6pm (Exhibition Opening Party)

HYDROCity Exhibition

Models and drawings of design projects from Canada, The Kingdom of the Netherlands, the USA, and elsewhere.

HYDROCity exhibition extension venue: John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto
230 College Street

This exhibition was made possible in part through the generous support of RBC Blue Water Project™

9 pm – late (Performances and Festival Closing Party)

Drake Hotel, Lounge
1150 Queen Street W., 416.531.5042

The Wet Cabaret

The water is hot at the annual Alphabet City cabaret. At this year's party, the drinks will flow and the music will surge; the readings will be effervescent, and the performances will be steamy. From bubbly cocktails to literary lap dances, the Wet Cabaret is guaranteed to quench your thirst.

Friday 6 November

9 am – 5:30 pm (Symposium)

John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto
230 College Street

HYDROCity: A Symposium on Hydrology and Urbanism

This all-day symposium gathers international researchers to reflect on the future of urban water infrastructures.

Water Colloquium and Launch

A colloquium and book signing for the NYC launch of Alphabet City's WATER anthology.
Hosted by Robert Kirkbride, Interim Director of Parsons SCE Product
Design, the event will feature an overview from Alphabet City’s Editor,
John Knechtel, and short talks by contributing authors Melissa Grey,
Bhawani Venkataraman, Mei Chin, and Kirkbride

Montreal Events

3 pm (Book Launch)

John Knechtel: Water

“Our urban water systems were built to prevent cholera and other water-borne scourges, but their unintended legacy has been the long-term degradation of our cities’ water ecology.”
—John Knechtel, Water (2009)

John Knechtel, editor of Alphabet City, discusses the publication Water, which considers the current state of this vital substance, from the mythic to the infrastructural. The book launch is part of the ABC Festival 2009: Water with events in Toronto, New York and Montréal including a panel, exhibition, and symposium series about the future of cities’ relationship to water.

Water is the latest release in the Alphabet City publication series, which rethinks central ideas of everyday life such as fuel, trash, and food. Co-published by The MIT Press, each volume addresses a single theme from various perspectives, revealing its processes and possibilities.

All About AbC Festival 2009: Water

Water—chemical matrix of life, transportation conduit, industrial feedstock, agricultural necessity–is coming under new pressures. This year Alphabet City considers the current state of this most vital substance, from the mythic to the infrastructural.

The WATER festival includes HYDROCity–a panel, exhibition, and symposium series about the future of our cities’ relationship to water.

The festival also launches Water, Alphabet City’s’s 14th anthology, a hardcover, full-colour artbook copublished with The MIT Press. Alphabet City seeks to build a better world by producing innovative perspectives on every aspect of urban life, from A to Z.

AbC and Water elsewhere

Art from Water

Reviews and Advance Praise for Water

“We keep forgetting water is a precious resource. This collection of art, words and information—the latest issue of the politics and culture journal Alphabet City—does what the movie "Powers of Ten" did for our perception of life on planet Earth.

From molecule to global resource, water is examined from every angle. There's a consideration of the music in the shower scene in Hitchcock's "Psycho," facsimile reprints from the pages of a water-damaged ledger from the 1905 Yukon Gold Rush, schematics of agricultural and hydrocultural typologies. "Water" offers a flood of images that leaves a nostalgic residue for a resource we so often take for granted.

There's also the haunting effect of the book itself—something archival that makes us feel we hold a precious remnant in our hands.”

—Susan Salter Reynolds, LA Times, October 11, 2009

“Visually eclectic and artistically driven, this work collects about
25 contributors who offer individualistic creations inspired by
water...This book is like having an art gallery in your hands...an
eccentric but intriguing volume”—Booklist, September 15, 2009

On Alphabet City

“Toronto’s Alphabet City Festival brings together practitioners
from the arts and sciences and points them at issues of global
concern. Previous years have examined topics including food and
terrorism. It sometimes feels that some festivals offer little lasting
value beyond a branded tote bag, and it’s good to see one event
aspiring to be more of a think tank than a marketing shindig.
The only problem is that it’s in Canada, and we’re not. Fortunately,
the series of books produced to coincide with the festival is
rapidly gaining an international reputation of its own, and the
latest is excellent.”—ICON, London, UK

“Alphabet City blurs the line entirely between book and journal,
chapbook and zine. An annual periodical -- or is it a series of
hardcover anthologies? …Think of it as the independent film of
the publishing world.”—Los Angeles Times

Media contact

John Knechtel, Director, Alphabet City
416 854 7171

Image Credit

Shore Break, Haida Gwaii by Eamon Mac Mahon

Support Alphabet City by purchasing a print of Shore Break, Haida Gwaii on our Print Sale page